Calamity (Reckoners, #3)

“Don’t be silly, lass,” Cody drawled. “It was the king of Morocco. Cupcakes are too dainty for a Scotsman. Give him one, and he’ll ask why didn’t you shoot the wee cake’s parents instead and serve that.”


I smiled as Megan unhooked the side of her mixer and quietly retrieved the pair of Beretta subcompacts hidden inside, along with a pair of suppressors. Her mixer wouldn’t work—its innards had been sacrificed to give us storage. That had seemed a reasonable risk to Tia, since the team doing the searching down below wasn’t likely to have access to electricity.

We each screwed a suppressor in place, then tucked our handguns into underarm holsters. I plugged in my mixer, which did work; the loud wrrr it put out gave us covering sound. I threw some ingredients into the mixing bowl just in case, then laid out the decorating tools.

Advantageously, our little pantry had its own door into the main room. I moved over to peek out while Megan tore apart her mixer’s power adapter and removed a small, boxy device much like a mobile.

I cracked the door to do a quick survey of the party. The kitchens were in the absolute center of the seventy-first level, which was important, since a portion of the floor outside rotated.

A revolving restaurant: one of those strange ideas from pre-Calamity that I sometimes had trouble believing were real. Once upon a time, ordinary people could have come up here for a nice meal while they looked over the city. The tower’s pinnacle restaurant was like a wheel, with the hub remaining stationary and the floor rotating in a ring outside. The outer walls were stationary as well. The ceiling rose in places two more floors to the tower’s roof; the partial levels above us were now being used only to position lighting.

The transformation into salt had positively ruined the machinery for the floor, particularly the motors and wires. Getting the place rotating again apparently required the effort of a work crew, engineers, and a minor Epic named Helium who had levitation powers. Loophole went through the hassle every week though, to make something special—something that would stand out. A very Epic thing to do.

I spotted the woman herself sitting at one of the tables on the rotating portion. She had a pixie cut and a slender build. A nice complement to the 1920s-style outfit she wore.

The party up here was more subdued than the one on the first floor; no loud music, just a string quartet. People sat at tables draped in white, waiting for food. In other areas, the salt tables and chairs had been moved aside to allow dancing, but nobody was bothering with that. Instead each table was its own little fiefdom, with an Epic holding court, surrounded by sycophants.

I picked out a series of minor Epics, noting which ones were still alive—meaning they’d thrown their lot in with Prof rather than fleeing the city. Stormwind was there, surprisingly: a young Asian woman sitting on a dais. She had obviously weathered her time in Prof’s prison and been released. Prof had apparently paraded her around as he had in order to show that he was now dominant in Ildithia. But ultimately, he needed her. Without her powers the crops wouldn’t grow, and luxuries—and even basic necessities—in the city would dry up.

I shook my head. I couldn’t see the entire room from my vantage, as it was shaped like a ring, but Prof wasn’t in this half—and I doubted he was in the other half. He wasn’t likely to attend a party like this.

“We’re in position,” Mizzy said softly over the line. “We’ve made it to the seventieth level.”

That was where Tia was being held, and was also where Prof’s rooms would be. The two were on opposite sides of the building though, so hopefully we’d have Tia in hand and be gone before he even realized we’d been here. Her original plan had included luring him out of his rooms with a distraction so she could grab his information without him knowing, but we didn’t have to worry about that now.

“Roger,” Cody said. “Nice work, Team Hip. Wait for David’s or Megan’s go-ahead before continuing.”

“Yeaaah,” Mizzy said. “No risk of us doing otherwise. This place is littered with security cameras. Infiltration suits won’t be enough to get us any farther.”

“We’ll get ready for step three,” I said. “Just let us…”

I trailed off, my jaw dropping as I spotted something out in the main room.

“David?” Cody asked.

Someone had rotated into view, sitting on a salt throne and surrounded by women in tight dresses. A man in a long black coat, with dark hair that tumbled past his shoulders. He sat imperiously, hand resting on the hilt of a sword, which stood point-down beside him like a scepter.

Obliteration. The man who had destroyed Houston and Kansas City and tried to blow up Babilar. The tool that Regalia had used to push Prof into darkness. He was here.

He met my eyes and smiled.